Google's Outlook interface a weak nod to corporate reality

While Google is in hot pursuit of an enterprise e-mail business, the announced support this week for Outlook as a client interface for Gmail does little to distinguish the vendor from other players chasing top-dog Microsoft.

Google last week unveiled Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, synchronization technology that supports Outlook as the front end to Gmail. It gives administrators an option to scrap Exchange for Gmail on the back end while allowing users to keep their familiar desktop client.

But it was little more than needed catch-up to a crowded field of vendors offering corporate users alternatives to Exchange, and it was a thin cover-up for the fact that Google had nothing to say about how Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) and its recently announced Google Wave might team up to redefine messaging and collaboration.

"[The client] was the limiting factor of Gmail," says Guy Creese, analyst with the Burton Group. "There are some people who like the Gmail interface — universities and their students are in that category — but you have others for which Outlook is ingrained in the way they work and if you take away Outlook you are taking away their security blanket."

Given that fact, many of Google's competitors long ago saw fit to support Outlook as a client in their battle-against-Exchange strategies, including IBM and Novell, and lesser known alternatives such as Alt-N Technologies, CommuniGate, Gordano, Kerio, Mailsite Fusion, Open-Xchange, Scalix and Zimbra.

Outlook integration had been a lingering checkbox Google had yet to fill, but it is only one bit of an enterprise e-mail story that is captivating universities and mostly smaller companies but not larger enterprises.

Forrester Research reports that most inquires it fields are from companies up to 8,000 employees. The interest is mostly around cost savings or business-to-business relationships.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook provides synchronization for e-mail, calendar and contacts between Gmail and Outlook/Exchange, which is equal or less functionality than other competitors provide.

Google's previous one-off kluge of integration technologies for Outlook often came under criticism from analysts and Google users alike for being disjointed and slow.

On his blog, Rafael Laguna de la Vera, CEO of Open-Xchange, an on-premises and hosted provider of Linux-based e-mail platforms, called Google's Outlook support "basic."

"People also like mail filters, changing their passwords, the full Outlook experience, as ugly as it may be. We've been there, and done that… . It is quite amazing that big G finally realizes that integration into other foreign platforms is so important, because people are so used to them."

As Google catches up on the front end, it is being caught on the back end.

While Google's data center that hosts Gmail is robust, outsourced e-mail is nothing new and there is plenty of competition from Microsoft with its Business Productivity Online Suite, IBM's Hosted Notes and Yahoo's Zimbra.